The Secret Bride (51 page)

“Ahhh!” he hollered out in pain.

“Oh, Carew, why must you make this so tediously simple?” Henry’s voice in response boomed out the question to the young man with more than a passing interest in Charles Brandon’s sister, Anne, as he let go the arm with an irritated, whipping flourish. Then he made it back to his feet to the roar of applause from the ingratiating nobles who had insisted on watching the king wrestle. Adore the attention though he did, it lost something without Brandon. Charles had always been the only one brave enough to actually try to beat him. He missed that. Fool bastard! Letting his prick lead him instead of his sense. Or, at the very least, that deplorable ambition of his.

Henry splashed water on his face from a basin held by a stony-faced boy with red hair like his own, and a dusting of freckles across the bridge of his nose. “The water is revoltingly warm! Did your master not tell you it must be very, very cold?”

The boy’s face went crimson with horrified embarrassment.

“Another basin!” the steward near him called out. It was called out three times, an echo down a line of liveried servants before the king growled temperamentally, “Oh, never mind!” Then he tossed the towel onto the mat and stalked out of the great hall, followed by a collection of stunned servants and ambassadors, who knew better than to utter a word.

Perhaps I should hunt,
he thought.
Feel the wind in my hair, the breeze on my face.

But those thoughts, as with wrestling, tethered him back to Brandon, and to his own anger at the betrayal. Wolsey was waiting for him in his private dressing chamber, sitting in a high-back tapestry-covered chair, as Henry held his arms up and his sweat-stained shirt was removed for him by servants.

“What the devil have you come to plague me about? More pleadings from that miscreant?”

Wolsey silently extended the letter across his scarlet silk–draped girth, the red wax seal broken, a bit of black ribbon suspended from it. “Actually, it is from the King of France, sire,” he replied evenly. “He wishes you to know of his great pleasure in the diplomatic work of the Duke of Suffolk. He speaks long and glowingly of His Grace’s negotiating skills and of His Majesty’s wish that, through Suffolk, your two countries may stay strongly allied.”

“Don’t look at me like that, Thomas,” he said acidly. “I can see your thoughts right through that shiny, bald head of yours.”

“Surely Your Highness knows I have only your happiness, and the safety of England, inside of my head—as well as my heart.”

“Too flowery even for you, Thomas. We’ve known each other far too long for that. Shall we not call a spade a spade and just admit that you have been on their side in this underhanded venture almost from the start?”

“Mary and Charles are both dear to me, as they are to you, Harry,” he chose to say. “They have been meant for a very long time to be together. That much I will acknowledge.”

“Honesty becomes the cleric in you. It is a novel approach you really should try to use more often.”

Wolsey nodded almost to a bow. “Forgive me, Your Highness, if I have shown anything to you but the greatest, most humble, respect.”

Once Henry had changed his costume, they walked together out into the long hall with its wall of windows and length of rich Persian carpet. When they were entirely alone, Henry’s tone softened. “Look, Thomas, I would like this resolved as well, but it seems an insurmountable task. If I took them back now, after how they deceived me, the world would think me a weak ruler, something I have spent my reign struggling against.”

“Yet perhaps there is a way.”

“If you truly could find me a path out of this quagmire, Wolsey, I would think you a genius, and the most important person in all the world. . . . The second most important,” Henry said, smiling.

Wolsey knew that he was right. The impulsivity of their marrying in secret had cost them both dearly regardless of the fact that Henry had already promised his sister the right to select again. Clearly, it was a promise he chose not to remember. While he had always known Henry might battle her on her selection of a politically unimportant figure like Brandon, Wolsey also had great confidence in his own negotiating skills. They were about to be put to the test right now as Henry softened enough to listen to a compromise.

“I did not last very long being angry at her, did I? At least not as long as I meant to,” the king said of his sister.

“Well, Your Highness, even a hardened old cleric such as I would acknowledge there really was never anyone at this court quite like your Mary.”

I was contented to conform myself to your said motion, so that if I should fortune to survive the late king, I might with good will marry myself at my liberty without your displeasure. Whereunto, good brother, ye condescended and granted, as ye well know.

—Mary Tudor, in a letter to Henry VIII.

May 1515, Hotel de Cluny

The second week in May, Mary felt the desperation to return home so profoundly that she wrote a pleading letter to her brother in a scribbled shorthand, full of corrections and changes. Charles, as well, and even Queen Claude, who had become a friend, wrote to Henry VIII on their behalf. Mary was not sorry; she could never be that. But she would sound contrite, if it helped Henry to forgive them and allow her and Charles to return home to England as husband and wife.

The eventual response from London, with Wolsey’s handprint clearly on the design of it, was cold, sharp and very clear. After a period of ten days in which they were left to consider their crime, if there was forgiveness to be had, the vast sum of four thousand pounds must be paid to Henry. In addition, the great diplomat, the Duke of Suffolk, must find a way to convince Francois I to return to England the vast fortune of gold, jewels and silver Mary had brought in her dowry to France. Since the betrothal had been immediately canceled upon his marriage, Brandon would also forfeit the lucrative wardship of Elizabeth Grey. They were harsh terms that would be difficult to arrange, and to abide by. As far as Henry’s pride was concerned, the more difficult the terms the better. The sum would reduce what Mary had to live well on for the rest of her life and, at that moment, that indignity suited her angry brother well.

Mary and Charles sat together on a stone bench beneath a wooden pergola surrounded by new spring vines. His arm was around her, and she sank against him as if he could shelter her not just from the cool breeze, but from everything else that was harsh in the world.

“It is what we had hoped for,” Charles said cautiously of the letter, which he had only just received. “A way home again.”

“But a punishment as well, when he promised me himself that I could marry who I wished,” Mary stubbornly countered.

Charles smiled and ran a hand down along the line of her jaw, seeing for the first time since they had come to France the little girl in her he had long known. “Now, now, my heart.

He deserves some way to save face, and a bit of our humbling ourselves before him. He
is
the king, after all.”

“He is also my brother, and he gave me his word.”

“He did not mean that we could take that to the extreme.”

He kissed her cheek tenderly, still charmed by her irascible nature, then he pressed his mouth onto hers. “Come now, let’s give him what he asks for, be glad we still have our heads . . . and let us go home, hmm?” He smiled that charming Brandon smile. “After all, you go as my wife, and he does not ask for that to change, which is something . . . would you not agree?”

Ten days later, Mary stood on the dock before the
Mary Rose
, which had been sent from England for their return, a damp mist swirling around them, and her dress fluttering in the breeze up off the briny water. She held tightly to Claude, who had become a dear friend. The young French queen had never blamed Mary for her own husband’s attraction to her, and every day she had spent in France she had only ever treated her with kindness. Francois’ mother, who stood beside her daughter-in-law in the courtyard of Fontainebleau, liked Mary less. Yet she still managed a chilled, slight smile of farewell as Mary moved to stand before her.

“You have made it memorable,” Mary said to her so sincerely that the innuendo was lost on all but the cunning Louise de Savoy.

“As you have for France,
ma chère
. Trust that no one here shall soon forget you and the drama in which you have embroiled us all.”

Mary was glad to have Charles’s tall, reassuring presence beside her, and his powerful hand at the small of her back, pressing her then toward the duc de Longueville, whom she stood before next. She waited as Charles embraced him first, then she took up his offered hand. Into it he pressed a small slip of paper, then closed her fingers around it.

“See it to Mistress Popincourt for me, will you?”

Mary smiled at him. “I will, Louis,” she said with a gentle complicity. “And I shall remind her that France is lovely this time of year. She will have forgotten that.”

They then said farewell to Diane de Poitiers and her husband, Louis de Brézé, Mary embracing Diane tenderly and with great affection as she had Claude. “Thank you,” Mary said, remembering her role in their union. “For
everything
.”

“I envy you a true romantic love, Mary. It is between you very like the one in my favorite poem,
Le Roman de la Rose.
”

“I know it well.”

“Hold on to that with all of your heart,” Diane said.

Their eyes met. There was far more in them than even what her words had implied. Mary glanced at de Brézé, older, tired, someone who did not seem a romantic match for his dy-namic, much younger wife, and she wondered what might be in store for her one day.

“I shall remember that,” Mary said, meaning it with all her heart. “And I promise, I shall ever remember you.”

The
Mary Rose
docked at Dover seven months after the king’s ship had first taken Mary to France to become a queen. She was returning to England a duchess. She stood now on the ship’s deck filled with dread for how desperately she had at first wanted to return home. The details had been worked out through emissaries at last and yet still, she must face Henry. His eyes, she knew, would hold his disappointment in her most brightly.